The Girl from Krakow

by Alex Rosenberg

  “Most irregular.”

  Urs proffered his card once more. “Nurse, I am a medical man. I do understand. I would not presume except for the urgency . . .” He was perspiring again. The nurse appeared to notice. She plucked up a pen, dipped it, and began to write in her careful hospital hand. She gave him the slip of paper. “It’s in Ivana Honty Street, ground floor, between here and the station.”

  He looked at the slip, mumbled a “Thank you,” and turned. As he walked down the broad corridor back to the staircase, it dawned on him that if his worst fears were true, he could not face them or the humiliation that would attend them. But the thought had no influence on his course out of the building, retracing his steps along Svobody Prospect. When he came to Ivana Honty Street, he turned right, and a few moments later found himself in front of the address he had been given. It was four o’clock on an overcast afternoon. But there were no lights shining from any of the windows overlooking the street, even as he walked round all four sides of the large building. Then he ventured through the arched entrance and inside found himself facing the vast oak tree in the middle of the courtyard. Only one set of windows was lit. Urs moved around the quad so that the oak shielded him from the mullioned windows glowing in the dusk. He found himself wishing that he smoked or had a flask to keep him warm and provide some Dutch courage. But liquor made him ill, and cigarettes just left him coughing.

  All he could do was stand there hoping he was wrong. He fantasized this Dr. Romero opening the door, alone, and walking off to a restaurant. He tried to give the mental image detail . . . Urs would see the man lock his door, he would sigh in relief, hang back a minute, then head for the station, still mystified but relieved.

  Next he tried out the worst turn of events: he saw himself hammering at the door, rushing in to find them both smiling, laughing even, naked, at ease and completely unashamed, merely amused by his outrage.

  Then Urs began to sob. He tried to conjure up the innocent outcome again, the one that would do no worse than embarrass him. He couldn’t do it. Get a grip, man! Why are you crying anyway? He could live without her if he had to. If she left him, Urs’s life would be as it had been before they met—flat, but calm. He could deal with that. But that’s not what his life would be like. Whatever he did, wherever he went, he would be trailed, or heralded, by whispers from women, mockery from men, titters from their children. He couldn’t bear that. He would feel their schadenfreude: “Poor Pani Doctor Guildenstern . . . his wife left him.” The ridicule: “No surprise; I don’t wonder.” It would be as though he had been seen by the whole town urinating in public. He wouldn’t be able to face his mother or his father. Sharing his embarrassment, they would have to walk the footpaths of town with their eyes cast onto the pavement. He thought back to Rita. He could live with her not loving him, never having loved him. He could deal with that private chagrin, that mortification. What he could not bear was the public ignominy. He might as well be dead. Now the sobs came in unremitting waves, one after the other.

  Then he saw her, through the window, Rita stepping into a dress, and a man behind her, buttoning it up her back. The man came around from behind her toward the window. He knew that face. It took a moment. It was Tadeusz Sommermann.

  Urs found himself staggering out of the courtyard. Through tears now coursing down his cheeks, he stepped out from under the arch and saw a cab. He stepped in and ordered, “Take me to the river.”

  “There is no river in Lvov, Pan. They covered it for a sewer when I was a boy.” The cabbie laughed, but Urs had stopped listening.

  “Is there a lake, a reservoir? Take me.”

  “Yes, Pan. Yanovs’kyi Stav. It’s a big one, but it’s thirty kilometers out of town, and the road is rather rough.” The cabby hadn’t noticed how distraught his passenger was.

  “Take me there. Immediately.” Urs leaned back on the seat and closed his eyes.

  At about five thirty, Gil and Rita returned from tea. They would still have time together before her nine o’clock train. Facing another week apart, they both knew that the languid afternoon had not sated them.

  Waiting at the building’s entry arch was a porter from the hospital Gil recognized. The man looked relieved when he saw Gil. Stepping toward him, the porter drew up to something like attention and said, “A message for you, Doctor, from the hospital. I am to wait in case there is an answer.”

  Gil took the envelope, opened it, read the note, and passed it to Rita.

  Pan Dr. Romero,

  The emergency department has admitted a physician. His name is Guildenstern. Your address was found among his effects. The police are here as it is a case of attempted self-murder. The orderly is instructed to await any message you wish to send.

  It was signed by an emergency room physician Gil knew. Rita gasped. Gil turned to the porter. “Let’s go.” All three began to walk quickly to the hospital.

  At the entry to the Urgent Care stood a man wearing the cap-and-badge livery of Lvov cabdrivers, along with a policeman and a young man in doctor’s whites. Gil went directly to them. Rita followed. He addressed the doctor. “Geretski, what happened?”

  “It’s a doctor from out of town. Tried to drown himself. Lucky for him the cabbie here had the presence of mind to fish him out of the drink.”

  Gil and Rita turned toward the driver. Now they noticed his clothes were damp in spots and completely wet below the waist. Without prompting and with relish, the taxi driver repeated a narrative he had already given twice. “This guy asked to go all the way out to the reservoir at Yanovs’kyi Stav. Paid me off when we got there and told me he wouldn’t need me to take him back. Well, it was getting dark, and there’s never anyone there this time of year. I thought he was acting funny, so I drove away a few hundred meters, turned off my lights, and turned around. Then I just watched. The guy started walking along the shore picking up the largest stones he could find and put them in his pockets, overcoat, jacket, trousers, inside his waistcoat so they bulged. Didn’t care if he was ripping the clothing either. Well, you don’t have to be a doctor, pardon, to figure out what he was going to do. So I started the cab and drove back as close as I could. By the time I got to the shore, he was up to his neck.”

  “Thank you for saving my husband,” Rita heard herself saying.

  The policeman looked at her. “Does your husband know how to swim?”

  Rita caught the tense of the verb. “He’s all right?”

  “He’s out of danger now,” said the physician.

  “No, he can’t swim, Officer.” Turning back to the doctor, she asked, “Can I see him?”

  “Follow me.” The doctor turned, and Rita followed him.

  “Officer.” Gil cleared his throat. “I’ll vouch for my colleague. No need to trouble yourself. Thank you.” He tried to say it with authority.

  It seemed to work. “Very well, sir. I suppose there’s no need to take this further.” The policeman clicked his heels, bent slightly at the waist, and left.

  There was only the cabby left to deal with. “What did your passenger owe?”

  “Well, he paid for the journey out. But there is the fare back.”

  “How much?” Gil found the money and added several zloty. “For your trouble and your wet clothes.”

  Darkness descended, and then the streetlight came on, a sphere of white surrounded by purple. Gil could see his breath as he stood beneath it, waiting, smoking.

  Rita was in Urs’s hospital room for over an hour. She emerged shriven. Seeing Gil, she walked over to him. “It’s finished.”

  He had realized as much. Had she returned to him in only a few minutes, he would have known that they could remain together. The longer he waited, the vainer grew this hope. Well before the hour was past, he was beginning to prepare himself for the end of their idyll.

  “I am going back to Karpatyn with him tomorrow morning,” she said. She bit her lower lip to stop the tremble. Once in control again, she continued, “He’s completely in command of hi
mself. He said he would find a way to finish it . . . so coolly, no bravura . . .” Gil did not speak. Rita continued, “I couldn’t live with that. I told him I’d go back with him.”

  “So, it’s you or nothing for him? I can’t think of Urs as driven by love.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not love. It’s shame. Mostly he talked about what people would say, what people would think. His parents, his patients, the whole town. When I said I’d go back with him, it was as though a coffin lid had been pried open. He started living again.”

  Now Gil knew what he was dealing with. His counterattack was ready. “So, he doesn’t love you; it’s amour propre that nearly killed him. Well, is that a reason for you to go back with him? Is it for his self-esteem that I . . . that we have to sacrifice our happiness? I can’t say I care much for how a market-town doctor deals with his personal misfortune, even if I did grow up in the same market town. I don’t live there anymore. You don’t have to either.” The words subsided. Gil waited a moment, gauging their effect on Rita. She was evidently not ready to reply. Perhaps it was moving her from her resolve.

  Gil continued, “And what about you? What do you really owe him? Don’t you have a right to a life? Why should he be able to trump your happiness just by threatening to throw himself into a reservoir? Rita, we need to break with this petit bourgeois morality.”

  Now Rita finally interrupted. The words came almost with contempt. “Stop lecturing. Listen to yourself. What you are saying is sheer hypocrisy, selfishness dressed up as moral philosophy.” Before he could reply, she started again, now calm. “Remember what you said this morning? Doing right means nothing more than minimizing human misery. Well, that’s what I am going to do.”

  “What about my suffering? What about yours? There are two of us. He is just one.”

  “You don’t understand. I’m not adding up his misery on one side and our happiness on the other, and then seeing which way they balance out. That’s no better than bourgeoisie morality.”

  “Then why are you going to do this to us?” Now there was resignation in Gil’s voice. He took out a packet of cigarettes, slid it open, put two in his mouth, lit them both, and handed one to Rita. He wanted the aroma always to remind them of the afternoon they had just spent together.

  Rita drew deeply, and the smoke emerged in streams from her nostrils. Gil was standing close enough to see the dust motes in the light of the streetlamp.

  “I’m doing this to us because I can’t do anything else. I won’t dress it up as sacrifice, decency, obligation, doing what’s right in anybody’s book. I could live with the burden of his misery. But not his death. I’d be walking around the rest of my life trying to rid myself of the guilt. There is nothing I’d be able to enjoy . . .” She looked at him and reached for his lapel, smiling a little. “There’s nothing I’d be able to take pleasure in with that thought forever oppressing me.” She decided she had to make it concrete for Gil. “The image of Urs swinging somewhere from a noose, putting a gun barrel in his mouth, throwing himself in front of an express, taking an overdose of Seconal. I couldn’t bear it. And that’s flat.” Her hand dropped from his coat.

  The next morning Rita took Urs home. His clothes had been cleaned and pressed. He had a new collar and cuffs. His tie was straight and pinned with a pearl stick just above the waistcoat. No one would ever be the wiser. They rode the train talking inconsequentially, as if nothing had happened. Urs was calm; Rita was relieved. Really she was. At least she could live with herself.

  Five months later, in the late summer of 1939, she realized she was finally pregnant. The child would arrive early in 1940. She was calm when she told him and watched him mentally count the month back to June and then smile. The child would be his.

  PART II

  DURING

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was a series of repeated blows to the head, so swift and so hard you couldn’t recover before the next one. First the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. Soviet Communists making common cause with Nazis? Then, almost immediately, the Germans put an end to Poland. They did it so quickly the newsreels didn’t have time to cover the campaign. Where, everyone wondered, were the French and the Brits? Two weeks later the Soviet Army moved into Poland from the east. The Germans even withdrew from parts they had already overrun, leaving almost half the country for the Russians.

  Rita gave birth three months after Soviets marched in. They had decided to call the boy Stefan. She was unable to present her child to his maternal grandparents, however. There was now a border between them. It was the frontier between the western part of the Ukrainian SSR and German-occupied Poland. The mails remained efficient, however, and Rita was able to send pictures.

  Leaving the hospital with a baby in her arms, Rita walked into an entirely new experience. Urs handed her a new identity card. She was no longer a Pole. She was a Ukrainian now, a Soviet citizen, the wife of the director of a government polyclinic, open to all. His privilege to practice medicine had turned into a right, no, a duty to socialism’s future. The social order had been completely reversed. It was at least initially a rough meritocracy. The Russians demanded that things work. That took the ability to count, to read, to work a lathe or a telephone switchboard. If you could do those things, you were needed, and you were rewarded. The Soviet Union, she knew, was powerful but backward. Life would get harder, but not in every way worse, and in a few ways perhaps better.

  Urs’s unqualified enthusiasm for the new dispensation sometimes grated. Only once did they argue about it. “They want me to join the party.” He said it proudly one day in February as he returned from the clinic.

  “You aren’t going to?” It came out as something between a question and a protest.

  “Why not?” He drew himself up. “I’m director of a government facility. They won’t really trust me unless I am in the party. As a party member, I can get what the clinic needs. I owe it to my patients.”

  “Urs. Think. Once you are in the party, you’re subject to the whim of anyone above you. And you’ll be their scapegoat whenever a conspiracy is needed to explain away failure.”

  “What do you mean?” The question was sincere. Could it be that Urs had not been reading newspapers or listening to the radio for the last five years? Of course, Rita suddenly realized, this wasn’t hyperbole. Medicine had been the only thing that had absorbed him all that time.

  “Do you remember the little terror of ’37 and the great terror of ’38? Do you know what I am talking about? Stalin’s show trials in Moscow?”

  “Those were Trotskyite wreckers and German agents.”

  “They were loyal old Bolsheviks. Urs, this is the government that sealed a pact with Hitler to divide and conquer. You can’t get their blood on your hands.” That was the end of the matter. Rita was relieved. There was one more reason Rita could give, though it would cause Urs pain—something she had learned only the day before.

  Pushing her son in his pram a few streets beyond the market square, they had found themselves before what had been Jastrob’s Bookshop. She had scrupulously avoided it since the day she and Urs had returned from Lvov sixteen months before. The urge to ask about Gil would have been too great. The temptation to tell them about Gil would have been overwhelming. She had no idea whether, living only one hundred kilometers away, their son had ever divulged his whereabouts. She missed browsing the shelves, changing a library book, scanning the glossy magazines, but she would not be tempted to visit. She told herself the baby gave her no time for reading anyway.

  Now she was standing before the shop for the first time in almost a year. The sign above the door was gone, and the two front windows were both broken. The door hung askew, held by a single hinge. Peering inside she saw the shelves not just empty, but akimbo, and not a stick of furniture left unbroken. Then she heard something stir in the rear. Pushing the baby carriage down the side of the house, she saw an urchin breaking wood off what had been a coal shed behind the house. He stopped, expecting to be rep
roved by the posh lady with the pram. Rita remained silent, so he spoke. “Family’s cold. Can’t afford coal even when there is any.”

  Rita nodded as if to say, Go on. She looked at the back door of the house. “Where did they go? Do you know?”

  “Week ago, some Russian police came. I was watching from my window that morning.” His eyes indicated a small house just visible across the street. “Big black car, not Polish. Would’ve recognized the mark. Took them both away. Then they started in on the store. Burned the newspapers in the back. Hauled off all the books.” He stopped, then remembered something. “My dad said they were . . .” He searched for the word and found it. “Chekists.” Now Rita understood. The NKVD, the people’s commissariat for internal affairs, the security police. Probably not smart even to hang around this place either, unless you were doing something innocent, like stealing firewood.

  But she wasn’t going to tell Urs anything that might remind him of Tadeusz Sommermann. Not even to warn him against joining the party.

  Things changed gradually. Polish staples disappeared. Soviet ones replaced them, cruder but cheaper. People learned the etiquette of queuing. The farmers’ market persisted, and even Rita’s mother-in-law surrendered her qualms about making use of it. Very soon Karpatyn was crowded with refugees from the Nazi occupation. Demand pushed up prices. The Polish zloty was for the moment still in use. It didn’t matter to Rita. Urs was paid in rubles.

  None of this was important to Rita. Only her child mattered. She had not expected to find herself besotted by a helpless, inarticulate infant whose needs and wants you had constantly to guess at. He was no worse and no better than other babies, but he was hers, and he was enough to set aside all her vexations, all her disappointments. Rita was almost shocked by how love for her child just crowded out everything else that had absorbed her thoughts, how it blotted out her regrets, even the end of her affair with Gil. All she ever wondered about the affair now was how to label it—a dalliance, a lapse, a brief, purely sensual adventure? Surely not the beginning of a real love, just something cut short by mature reflection, a cooler head, caution, loyalty, guilt . . .